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<\/p>\nGovernment for Sale<\/p>\n
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It was Christmas of 1991.\u00a0Mikhail Gorbachev, the Communist Party Secretary and leader of the Soviet Union, failed.\u00a0 In his four years of power, the economic and political reforms he introduced to save the Soviet Union, desperate changes to \u201cCommunism,\u201d foundered.\u00a0 The economy didn\u2019t recover, the disparity of wealth between the party apparatchiks and the rest of the people was too great.\u00a0 The \u201cmember states\u201d of the Union had broken away.\u00a0 Gorbachev had decided to \u201c\u2026tear down this wall\u201d in East Germany, and the readymade markets of Eastern Europe were gone.<\/p>\n
Hard line members of the Communist Party revolted against the reforms in August, but were faced down by Boris Yeltsin (standing on a tank) and the people.\u00a0 The Communist Revolution of 1917 was over: \u00a0Gorbachev resigned on Christmas Day, and on New Year\u2019s Eve, 1991, the Soviet Union was dissolved.<\/p>\n
The Soviet Union was a Communist based economy.\u00a0 That meant that the means of production, the factories and the stores; were all owned by the government.\u00a0 So were the collective farms, the fields and machinery.\u00a0 With the end of the government, all of this went up for sale; up for grabs to the highest bidder.<\/p>\n
Much like the US South after the Civil War, those with some money, both insiders and \u201ccarpetbaggers,\u201d were able to \u201cbuy low\u201d in the fire sale of a buyer\u2019s market.\u00a0 Billons of rubles were made and lost; and a whole new class of wealthy \u201capparatchiks\u201d were created.\u00a0 They were not Communists; their path to government power was based on their money, legal or illegal. \u00a0Russia went from a Communist state to a \u201ckelptocracy,\u201d a nation based on theft, the theft of the fortune that was the Soviet Union. \u00a0The Russian people were still left with the money at the top, and the vast majority left to struggle.<\/p>\n
Those billions of rubles moved throughout the world economy, impacting most aspects of finance.\u00a0 The world center for financial markets is located in New York City, so it was no surprise that Russian rubles began to exert influence on American business and politics.<\/p>\n
There has long been a strain of American conservatism that believes that whatever needs to be done, private industry can do it better.\u00a0\u00a0 There is an old cartoon from the early 1960\u2019s that shows Senator Barry Goldwater, the father of modern conservatism, with an aide whispering in his ear \u201c\u2026Senator, the post office has always been owned by the Government.\u201d\u00a0 It was a joke, the Post Office is an original Constitutional authority of the government.\u00a0 It\u2019s not a joke anymore.<\/p>\n
The Trump Administration issued its proposal for Government reorganization last week, under the fog of the immigration scandal.\u00a0 The big items:\u00a0 merging the Departments of Education and Labor into one, \u201c\u2026to address the educational skills and needs of American students and workers in a coordinated way\u2026\u201d and moving all of the nutritional aid programs from the Department of Agriculture into a renamed Department of Human Services (to become the Department of Health and Public Welfare.)<\/p>\n
But it\u2019s in the privatization of long government-administered programs where the money can be made.\u00a0The air traffic control functions of the FAA, and the Postal Service are two services on now to go on the block.\u00a0 This is in addition to the private contracting of such services as the housing of interned migrants.\u00a0 The $10 million contract for the \u201ctent city\u201d camp erected in the Texas desert southeast of El Paso, was let to General Dynamics, a company best known for building defense systems.<\/p>\n
And now the Trump Administration is looking to build what can only be called internments camps for many thousands of immigrants on military bases throughout the country.\u00a0Those camps will be paid for by the Defense Department, but the actual building won\u2019t be by the Army Corps of Engineers or the Seabees.\u00a0 These are high priced contracts, going out to private companies.<\/p>\n
It has been the \u201cmantra\u201d of conservatism that private industry can do it better.\u00a0 We in Ohio have seen the folly in that plan, at least in the traditional government function of education, with the colossal failure of ECOT, the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow, a private computer based school that received an enormous amount of state funding.\u00a0 ECOT ultimately enrolled thousands of students who didn\u2019t \u201cattend,\u201d and received millions of dollars for them.\u00a0 While it is now being sorted out in the courts, at least $60 million in state educational funding was misused.<\/p>\n
So while the privatization of government may seem like a good \u201ccapitalist\u201d plan, we should look carefully at the available examples.\u00a0 The \u201cfire sale\u201d of the Soviet Union, that brought us the kleptocrats of Russia, made the rich richer, and left the people even farther behind.\u00a0 And we know that Russia seems to be admired by the far-right minds that provide the Trump ideology.\u00a0 And we also know there\u2019s lots of money to be made by \u201cselling\u201d the government.<\/p>\n
Doesn\u2019t that sound like ideas designed to appeal to President Trump?<\/p>\n
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